


Cutting Through The Noise

by orphan_account



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Depressed Luke, Depression, Gen, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 15:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9825836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Luke has depression. It doesn't kill him;or,the many people who've helped Luke get through the day at some point.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So hi! I wrote a canon compliant thing!
> 
> Warning: Although, it’s never actually expressly mentioned here that Luke has depression, I wrote it with the intention that he indisputably is mentally ill (and he and almost everyone around him does, too) and has suicidal thoughts here. It’s pretty passive, though.

He hates Jocelyn for saving him, sometimes. Except that he doesn't.

It's strange, despising the actions of a person who he knows was right, had been right all along.  
Because the moon comes out every night, and every night he thinks of her and the thought keeps him at bay. But every morning the sun rises and he hates her for keeping him alive through all of it.

He knows she deliberately didn't force him to do anything, but he also knows that there are claws waiting to break out from within and that Valentine could have been right.

*

It's a long road, people say and anyone who doesn't already have a good piece of it behind them doesn't know what it means.

*

Sometimes he has to blame himself to stay alive.

Jocelyn introduces him to Clary and he thinks that he is an absolute piece of shit. That only an idiot could have been planning to leave behind his life when this was waiting for him.

Clary reaches out with a pudgy hand and his heart tells his brain to shut up.

*

He meets Alaric and later Alaric will thank him for allowing him to learn, but what Alaric will never know is how he had showed Luke the ropes.  
How, by making any mundane task that seemed impossible to Luke's brain, he had saved Luke's everyday.

*

Sometimes he forgets how much older Magnus is than him. Sometimes he's reminded and it comes as a shock.

Sometimes it's as easy as making jokes about the people that don't understand, that never will. The lucky ones.

Sometimes it hits hard, when Luke is not able to move his feet and Magnus stands beside him and tells him that he's been alive for over 400 years, and waiting for another twenty, thirty minutes, two, three, four hours for Luke to move again won't kill him.

*

Luke saves Maia and doesn't feel like he accomplished anything.

"It's not going to get easier for her," he tells Jocelyn. "Chances are, it's going to be harder, even. I told her misery is worth it."

"Would you rather she killed herself?" Her eyes are hard, free of deceit. Anything less than her fury would have felt like a lie.  
She's always done this for him, she's always refused. She refuses to accept the part of him that wants to sacrifice himself for nothing. She wouldn't allow for him to give up any piece of himself.

"No!" he says and is relieved at the amount of horror he feels at the mere suggestion.

Jocelyn runs a finger over his knuckles. "You did a good thing. The right thing. How often can we say that that is the same?"

When Simon turns into a vampire, Luke tells him the misery is worth it and he knows it's true.

*

Simon makes him watch sitcoms.

Perceptive in a way that only people close to him can pick up on, Simon has noticed Luke's weighing sadness early on, Luke suspects. But it's taken him some time to figure out what he wants to do about it.

So when he's old enough, when he gets Netflix, he coaxes Luke out to take a seat in front of the screen, sitting with him and watching and gauging his reactions.

It becomes a regular thing and Simon seems satisfied with the success, but to Luke it's overwhelming.  
Not all the time, but sometimes he thinks about a joke that Simon laughed especially hard at, instead of a dark thought when he's lying in bed and it means everything.

He catches Simon pacing in his room, hands shaking and muttering non-consequential things, before he's supposed to go to school one day.  
He circumvents Simon's password, pulls up _Arrested Development_ and leans back.

*

Shadowhunters are a tricky people and it's a true testament to time that sometimes Luke forgets that he was one of them.

Alec, Isabelle and Jace slice through demons like water and they remind him of times where Valentine and him could stand back to back without Luke having to worry about Valentine's blade slipping and cutting him instead of the monster in front of him.

They also remind him of the times that Luke spent with Jocelyn and Valentine in the gardens, when no one else was around. How Valentine had slung an arm around Luke's shoulders from behind, grinning wild and uncontrollable when Luke pretended to be surprised by the sneak attack.

Alec and Jace whirl around each other and Luke looks away.

*

He loses Jocelyn and he thinks he's going to die.

He doesn't.

*

After Simon reveals himself to his mother and asks Luke to help him explain everything, Luke lingers after Simon leaves and thanks her like he's been meaning to do for years.

She doesn't understand, he sees it in her eyes and he doesn't need her to, but he needs her to know that after Clary had befriended Simon and they had been over for dinner at each other's places she had given him the power to believe that he couldn't just blend in in this world he had been forced into, but that he could belong.

She smiles sadly when they pass the photograph of Simon's dad in the hallway and tells him she'll do her best. He knows that that'll be more than enough.

*

Valentine dies and Luke feels nothing.

He had told Valentine he wasn't his parabatai anymore and he should feel victorious, in a way, because he was right.

Instead, he crawls into bed that night and stares at the ceiling. He listens to his body, to the functions, tunes in his hearing, waits for the pain. At least phantom pain should kick in, he thinks, it would be fitting for Valentine to leave the illusion of attachment as a last gift.

Nothing.

In the morning, without having closed even one eye, he's convinced himself that it might be even more fitting this way.

*

 _You have to do it for yourself_ , Valentine had told him after he had turned and now, decades later, Luke calls bullshit.

*

Jace defects from the Shadowhunters effectively and sometimes he finds Luke and asks for stories. Never directly, at first, but his attention never wanes and Luke knows he wants to hear about survival, about doing the impossible and _living_ , and Luke tries his best to give it to him. Jace is in need of a softness that astounds and their versions of Valentine don't match up in most parts, but the overlap doesn't hurt anymore.

When the stories start to repeat themselves, once Luke feels like he should be exhausted from telling them, turned inside out from so much truth, Jace starts responding.  
Luke knows most things about Jace's life already, it's hard to have been involved in Valentine's war and not get to know Jace's story, but they're not tales of horrific abuse or heroism or any of the big parts. They're about the small inbetweens, the things meaningless to anyone but Jace, that he's held onto, because everything else, everything all encompassing and meaningful had slipped away.

Luke gets that better than anyone else.

*

Luke hogs Alaric's warmth selfishly.

He's aware that he doesn't exactly get cold anymore - not unless there are extreme circumstances - but Alaric's heat is alluring, feels right, and it makes sure that Luke knows that it's _not him_ on the days where Alaric's bad mood eclipses everything.

*

He's there for everything - the transformations, the weddings, the children - and sometimes he looks up to Jocelyn, even though, they had both agreed that they didn't believe in the afterlife, and he thanks her.

"I blamed you so much some nights," he also tells her, "for making me endure. You gave me too much of a reason to live and you paved the way for all of it and sometimes I still wish it'd been me instead of you."

He laughs, then, because he knows that if she were there, she'd look at him, hard and unforgiving and offering him the sort of love that lasted for as long as the world would grant her. _'You're alive, I'm not,'_ she'd say. _'I like it that way.'_

She would've acted like her dying was just a thing that happens, the only way she could imagine it going. And as stubborn as she was, he probably would have believed her.

*

They try to be there whenever he doesn't want to be alone. They excel at it.

*

He sits in Clary's living room, in the chair that's always reserved for him and he leans back, into the backrest and into her stories, into the fierce caress of her voice that she's never lost, not a day in her life.  
It distinguishes her so much from Jocelyn, the way she's never able to distance herself.  
They're alone in the room, the others on one kind of errand or another, but he was too tired and Clary too stubborn to leave him.

She never begrudges him for not being able to pay attention to the meaning of her words much anymore, she has too much to say. Scooting closer to him she takes his hand, though, and it's hard for him to imagine the strength of her grip ever lessening.

She never does leave him, not for long, she lets him go first and the color of her hair never fades, the way Jocelyn and him had both thought it might.

*

There has always been too much room in his heart, the space leaving him vulnerable, and he had collected pain over time, filled up the holes with the already lost.  
_You have to do it for yourself_ , Valentine had said, but it hadn't been Luke who had cleaned out the space in his heart, and filled it with the present tense.


End file.
